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Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH RFC 7/9] xen: Handle resumed instruction based on previous mem_event reply




On 03/07/2014 10:12, Razvan Cojocaru wrote:
On 07/03/2014 12:02 PM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 03.07.14 at 10:55, <rcojocaru@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 07/02/2014 06:56 PM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 02.07.14 at 15:33, <rcojocaru@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In a scenario where a page fault that triggered a mem_event occured,
p2m_mem_access_check() will now be able to either 1) emulate the
current instruction, 2) skip the current instruction, or 3) emulate
it, but don't allow it to perform any writes. Since some SSE2
instructions are problematic to emulate (Firefox uses some),
support for setting the A and D (accessed and dirty) bits has been
added (please see p2m_set_ad_bits()).
Sadly that reference is useless - the function doesn't have any
explanation what all this is about either.
p2m_set_ad_bits() ends up calling the code in
xen/arch/x86/mm/hap/guest_walk.c, namely an "instantiation" of
hap_p2m_ga_to_gfn(GUEST_PAGING_LEVELS)(), which in turn calls
guest_walk_tables() (from xen/arch/x86/mm/guest_walk.c), which sets up
the A/D bits allowing the problematic instructions to run while
bypassing emulation for that specific case.
That's the mechanical part one can indeed work out from the patch.
The interesting but unexplained thing here is which "some SSE2
instructions" you refer to, and what's so special about them (you
not also including e.g. AVX here makes me further curious, as in
most cases AVX ones are direct extensions of SSEn ones, and hence
I'd expect them to be similarly problematic).
An example that kept appearing with Xen 4.3 and Firefox in our test
environment was: divsd xmm0, qword ptr [0x21c290]


Thanks,
Razvan Cojocaru

That is a bug in Xen (at least from your point of view). It should be fixed by either correcting, or as I suspect is more likely, actually adding emulation support for SSE instructions. Xen's emulation has traditionally been restricted to the code instruction set and anything which could reasonably fault against MMIO regions. As a result, its knowledge of newer instruction sets is limited at best.

~Andrew



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